Simon's beekeeping blog

In June 2017, my friend Rick
invited me to go and visit him in Yorkshire to
attend an intensive introductory weekend course at
Leeds Beekeepers' Association.
The next summer, when I had moved to London, I started going along to the nearby
Walworth Garden apiary after another
course there to learn and volunteer. In those six months, I learned a lot
from the apiary manager Tristram Sutton and the other volunteers.

When I moved back to Somerset in January 2019, I became interested
in keeping my own bees.
I joined the local beekeepers'
association and have been going along to their meetings.
My nephew B, as well my friend Dave (pictured left) and D,
his daughter, are all joining in too.
Here I try to document in the form of a blog with photos
how we're getting on with setting up our nascent apiary, with the successes and
the mistakes. This blog is
mainly a learning exercise for me as a beginner beekeeper
so comments, corrections and opinions from anyone out there reading this are
always welcome.

The most recent updates follow in reverse chronological order. Older updates are archived for the year 2019. Comments are welcome via email.

With the abundance of updates about feeding getting a bit samey, I've adopted
a bit of a newsroom slant for September.

With this in mind, there's another bit of news that I'm over a week late
in reporting. That is,
Germany is to ban glyphosate weedkiller by 2023, when the
EU's approval period for it expires. A first phase will ban its use in parks
and private gardens from next year. This follows
a
petition in Bavaria urging
for the promotion of species diversity, which ten percent of the state's
voters signed, prompting the local government to pass the law without the
referendum it demanded.
It's not
just Germany banning it either — individual use is, or will be, prohibited
in Belgium, the Netherlands, France and elsewhere.

On a much more local level, I can report that
given all these discoveries and what appears to be a growing fondness
for the bees,
my dad has decided to forgo the use of Roundup on the big area adjacent to
the apiary, instead using the old-fashioned spade and less old-fashioned mower.

And about the feeding, this was the first day that I noticed any syrup left
in the feeder. In forty hours only a litre of syrup had been taken, leaving
about 300ml, suggesting that topping them up every other day is about right.

We met this visitor to our apiary this morning
calmly sitting on the gate. It looked bigger
than the honey bees, and, not knowing much about insects, I thought it might
be a hornet. Checking
a few pictures,
I was unsure whether
it was an Asian or boring old European hornet. I would have been wrong in both
cases.
Consulting a friendly
expert — probably needlessly — I'm told the visitor was a hoverfly,
'many of which are extremely good wasp and bee
mimics'.

Specifically, this looks like a
Hornet (mimic)
hoverfly (Volucella zonaria),
which resemble worker hornets.
But,
being flies,
they only have one pair of wings (hornets and wasps have two
pairs).
They also have more yellow stripes, rather than one fine yellow band,
and much darker legs than the
Asian hornet, which is also called the yellow-legged hornet, arguably
a more useful name for those, like me, who don't know a hornet from a fly.

On the walk back from the apiary, I realised that
I'm a day late in reporting, gentle reader (no, I only have one reader),
that it's
Asian Hornet Week. This
non-native species is bad news not only for bees, but for other pollinators,
and the BBKA are keen that everyone keeps an eye out for it, even suggesting
that we put aside an hour each day to watch for hornets going for nectar.
This is particularly important because not only was there a sighting near
Tamworth,
about 200km from us, on the second of September, but also one yesterday
in Ashford, about 300km.
There may have been more by the time you read this.
DEFRA and the Animal and Plant Health Agency maintain
an page of UK sightings which will provide rolling updates on the situation.

Beekeepers — with the requisite protective equipment such as a bee
suit — who see Asian hornets can assist by attempting to
collect a sample
with a net, tennis racket or fly swatter. The less intrepid can also try
to
take a photograph.
As well as this, beekeepers
are
encouraged to set out monitoring traps in their apiaries using the provided
instructions
and a YouTube video,
and then update the National Bee Unit records via
BeeBase to record that they've been set.
The traps are made out of a two-litre pop bottle, some garden wire, some
epoxy-coated floor mesh, some black plastic sheeting, and a bit of
cardboard. It sounds like a good weekend project for us all if we can
get together in the next few days to do it.
It's
simpler than one Tegwyn Twmffat's
solution —
a laser-equipped sentry gun controlled by a neural network.

Otherwise, another splendid sunset providing the backdrop to
another visit to top up the empty feeder. The only unusual thing I saw was a
cluster of woodlice in the roof. I'll have to check the whole hive
for more during this weekend's inspection.

It's beginning to get autumnal now, with a distinct bite in the air.
Conditions were very pleasant for a
meeting of all four of us — me, Dave, D and B — in a new,
more relaxed and tranquil inspection approach. It really is a pleasantly
unique way to spend an hour outdoors, and I always come back in a more
contented frame of mind.

Anyway, avid readers of this blog will recall that
just over a week ago the
comb in Colony One was covered in queen cells,
later understood to be emergency cells. Well, perhaps
now the emergency is over, because all but one of the cells was as though it
was never there,
and that cell has been vacated. There's no sign of any queen as far as
I could tell, but Dave
told me that until
she's mated she only appears marginally, perhaps
unnoticably, longer than
any other bees. For this and other reasons, she's harder to spot, and might
be hanging out by the wall or corner of the hive.
I think I saw a larger bee on the fourth frame of four and a
half, so there's hope.
What I don't remember seeing are were the big eyes and cigar-shaped
bodies of any drones,
even
though there's been no queen and plenty of food so far. I wonder if they've
been evicted already. I suppose it's
not in
the hive we need the drones, but some other colony which hasn't yet evicted
them.

What we saw a lot of was stores. All that syrup we've been putting
'upstairs' has ended up where the brood cells used to be a few weeks ago
when the queen was around. Old comb is now filled with shimmering nectar
ready for winter, but not an egg, nor larva, nor capped pupa in sight.
What this means if and when the new queen takes
charge is anyone's guess, but there are six or so frames unused which could
be used. I wonder —
if the virgin queen mated and established new, late brood in
the first couple of unused frames and stores in the rest then there would be
an eleven-frame winter-ready colony.
As ever, we'll have to watch and learn.

B got really stuck into the inspection process today, operating the
smoker, filling the feeder, looking at the central frame, taking photos
and filling out the checklist. He remarked on the propolis, on the honey
capping, and the reticules. He was calm in spite of how bad-tempered the
bees seemed to be today — he didn't flinch and was unbothered about being
stung. I suppose the colony have been through a lot, so perhaps there's good
reasons for them to be grumpy. There was still little sign of Varroa,
so we held off on applying Apiguard for another week.

In Dave and D's hive everything
looked great. Lots of brood, lots of storage,
a docile colony, and a sighting of the queen. Check back here in a couple of
days for a photo.

Another evening visit to feed the bees with B and C,
another empty feeder. B carefully tipped in the syrup and we spent
five minutes before going looking at the pollen on the bees' corbiculae.
The bees are going
bananas for the syrup, and we're wondering whether to go every day for
a bit to take advantage of that.

Some more
2:1
syrup for the bees. The feeder was again empty, so it looks like we're going
to feed them every other day at least.
B poured the syrup in very carefully so as not to drown the bees that
happened to be in the cup, with his sister C looking on. We had to go
late in the day, but there was a great sunset.

I went to the hive this evening to top up the feeder, and it was bone dry.
I'd made up just over a litre
of 2:1
syrup for them. As I poured it slowly into the feeder, twenty or so bees
suddenly appeared in the cup to eat more. They're hungry.

In more dramatic news, two experienced beekeepers have told me that the cells
in Friday's inspection that appeared to
be half in a brood cell and half hanging off at almost
right angles are in fact emergency queen cells. These are produced when some
catastrophe has befallen the queen and the workers make a new queen from
an existing brood cell. I haven't yet decided what, if anything, I'll do about
this. There are several options, but I'll write more about all this
in a few days.

The local
beekeepers' association runs a practical course, and today's session
was on honey extraction. There was an extractor and strainer set up and
we practiced uncapping frames of honey with the tool, and knives (heated
and unheated). The smell and the general gooiness of the honey was
great. It was surprising how much honey came out of a dozen frames.

We also got to try some unusual honey that Thomas had with him.
It was about twenty-five years old, very dark,
resembled treacle or molasses and had an
intense and delicious flavour. The bees that produced it fed mostly on lime
trees. They are extremely fond of the nectar and pollen from lime flowers, but
also collect the honeydew secreted onto the leaves by
aphids.
The resulting
honeydew honey
is something pretty special.
This
isn't unique
to the lime
tree
— many trees host honeydew-producing insects. Even the cosmic ash tree
Yggdrasilis mentioned in
Norse mythology, described as having honeydew falling from its leaves for
bees to nourish themselves on.

Thanks to Richard, we also got to see the photos of the sofa in
the barn that Dave and D's bees occupied when he collected them with Thomas
in July — one of them is attached to this entry.

The colony was fairly active today — lots of bees at the entrance and
clusters of bees hanging off the frames and
transferring food to each
other. The inspection confirmed a lot of what we saw last week. The
queen has gone, and the supersedure cells have increased in both size and
number, doubling to twenty since last week. Small clusters of supersedure
cells
appeared in the middle of nearly all of the frames, nearly all closed, but a
couple open with visible larvae inside.
The brood was pretty much all capped and mostly worker brood,
maybe 1.5 framefuls in total, in a healthy-looking pattern. However,
there's no eggs or larvae in there, so the colony hasn't seen a queen
for ten or so days.

The amount of stores hasn't increased much, maybe two framefuls, though
there's a little more pollen. I'm trying out feeding with sugar syrup
for now, so they got 500g sugar in 500ml water in a
rapid feeder — remember to
make sure the lid is secure if you use one.

A couple of day ago I stopped at the apiary and had a quick look at the
bottom board. There was a moth, but not a
wax moth
as far as I can tell. There was also a single 5cm long string of faeces,
but we couldn't find any signs of pests in the hive.

Despite being active, my bees were fairly docile today, buzzing only a
little after being given a few hard downward shakes. They've become
necessary now to be able to see any of the comb for all the bees in
residence at 9am. Perhaps we should inspect later in the day instead.
Dave and D's bees were very relaxed as they worked away, building up
stores for winter. It was the model of a chilled-out inspection, and we
saw the queen on the central frame too. I hope I'll get to spot a new queen
too in my hive next week.

Every inspection seems to be a case of expecting one thing and getting
something completely different. I usually spend a couple of minutes looking
at my notes from the previous week to put the next inspection into context
and something completely new jumps out at me and makes them irrelevant.

Today I was unable to see the queen again, despite seeing retinue-like
clusters of bees and a lot of both
worker and drone brood and week-old grubs on the comb.
We couldn't see many eggs — between the drone brood and the stores, it's
hard to imagine where they would be laid.

There's now the possibility that the colony will swarm — given the
number of bees I don't think this has already happened. The advice seems to
be to either do an artificial swarm or to destroy all but a couple of queen
cups, the ones that we perceive to be the strongest. Perhaps I should have
destroyed the unfinished cups in any case. For either remedy it
feels like time isn't on my side, but I will do some reading and
head down there on Monday if it looks like I it's sensible to do anything.
In any case, I'll take Dave's lead in starting to feed them now.
Swarming usually happens when there's insufficient room in the hive, and
Dave suggested shifting the frames around to give them more room — there are
six completely unused frames at the southern end of the brood box.

On the other
hand, as several wise beekeepers have told me, if they are going to swarm,
they will swarm. I suppose there's something to be said for letting nature
do its thing, especially at this late stage.
The bees are better at managing their colony than me, I'm sure, and despite
how I call them 'our bees', we don't own them.

Other than this, we have a fairly docile, healthy colony over the same
4½ frames. There are about two framefuls of stores, a strong ring of muddy
yellow pollen surrounding a core of biscuity brood.

Great news from Dave's colony! We saw the queen today, and although
we couldn't see many eggs, we could see larvae and pupae from about 7 days
at all stages, including hatching. Things are looking good there, not a sign
of a queen cell, and Dave seemed visibly relieved. He took us
out for lunch after the inspection and we
had a nice wander around
Burnham.

I was at the apiary today with a couple of hours without anything to do so
I sharpened an old pair of shears and tidied up the grass, something we'd
both been meaning to do for a little while. I didn't have my bee suit so
I just kept back from the bees, and all went well. We'd noticed earlier in
the day that the bees were bringing back a lot of either dark grey or bright
orange pollen. I thought it would be nice to get a photo, but one of the
guard bees had clearly had enough of all this nonsense and gave me a sting
on my upper cheek. This is my first sting as a beekeeper and I thoroughly
deserved it. And all this after suggesting to Dave
not to
use a strimmer near the hives in case the vibrations disturb the bees and
make them want to attack.

I deserved this partly because I spent longer around them than I needed to,
but mostly because I wasn't wearing a veil. If attacked or seriously
disturbed, bees will
go for
sensitive areas around the head of their attackers, guided in part by their
exhaled carbon dioxide.
When a bee stings anything larger than an insect,
her stinger — drones don't have stingers —
is drawn into the victim by two barbed slides either side of a stylus.
As one barbed slide catches and retracts, the stylus and the other barbed
slide is pulled into the wound. This process tears the stinger from the
bee's body and kills her.
Her last moments are spent flying around the head of the victim, distracting
them, as though to sting again. It's pretty convincing.

As for the stinger, it's
generally recommended
to
scrape it out of
the wound, with
a knife or credit card, for example, or even a fingernail if nothing else
is available. However,
a study in The Lancet
suggested that the amount of venom delivered is the same whether the sting is
scraped or pinched if done within two seconds,
and the main thing is to just get it out quickly.
My dad scraped with surgical precision with a Stanley knife he had to hand
and as a result there's barely any reaction now.
So, no real pain and no harm done, apart from to the bee, regrettably...

It
could have been much worse
than one sting to the face, of course, but it's enough for me to learn my
lesson to wear at least a veil and
not to take our bees' docile nature for granted.

Dave and I spent an hour inspecting this morning. It is idyllic — just us and the bees, the sun in the sky, the smoke wafting out of the smoker, with horses walking by, interrupted only by the occasional falconry drone. It's very easy to get in the zone when inspecting, kind of a mixture of being relaxed and also very focussed on the comb.

So, the status report from Colony One, still operating on 4½ frames with lots of tidy comb. My focus this time was on checking on the forming queen cells I'd seen, and wondering if my colony were going to get a new queen. The raised cell that we thought was a supersedure cell is no longer there. Maybe it was the beginnings of a queen cup that was later abandoned. It couldn't have held any egg at that point, anyway. There were no signs of chalk brook or bald brood this time. The varroa seems to be low in this colony too. The bees look healthy and were pretty relaxed (until we shook them off the frames).

There is brood of both types, flat worker and raised drone, and big plump white pupae all over the place, in the familiar pattern, nicely tight and compact. I did see some eggs, but not as many as I'd like. Over in Dave's colony, we tried hard for several minutes to find either the queen or some eggs, but to no avail. In both cases, and especially in Dave's, the central brood area is jam-packed with capped brood and grubs over maybe two or three frames in each case, and perhaps there's simply no room for the new eggs. Definitely something to look for in the next inspection, and ask some more experience beekeepers about.

We were both concerned about the lack of eggs and having not seen a queen. The other concern was the quantity of winter stores. Dave remarked at how from the weight of the frame, the quantity of stores and perhaps the general population felt as though it had reduced since the last inspection. When he'd lifted them out, we didn't see more than perhaps a frameful, along with a general reduction in the amount of comb being built. Dave had brought along some Candipolline Gold and left 500g of it to help with the stores. My bees have a bit more but I think I'll be starting feeding earlier and throughout September, just as Thomas had advised.

I continue to love looking at pollen. The bee bread in my colony is a dull grey but in Dave's there's some beautifully bright orange stuff in the familiar rings around the brood, as well as on the bees' corbiculae (pollen baskets). Apparently some people cook with bee bread. Anyway, we also saw a couple of times bees with their proboscises together, transferring food to each other (trophallaxis).

We both said we need to get better at finding the queen, though I suspect we see herretinue often and don't think to look for the queen among them. Maybe there's an online practice site we can visit or even create — I've found
an online photo album and
even a book so far.
Maybe we should just mark her the next time we see her, but since she's from a swarm, I wonder which year's colour she'd need to be marked with.

I've realised that I need to make a couple of changes with my record-keeping, specifically recording the number of frames on which I saw brood and recording stores by summing up both the total stores on all frames. The fact that I've seen 4½ frames all along on which there were some stores, is useless in situations like today when I want to know whether the total quantity of stores is going up or down. So from now on, I'll report the sum of the stores, and use the letter 's' to mean the number of frames used solely for stores, for example in a super.

Today's inspection was rained off, but we still went to take a look.
Instead of opening up the hives, D and I had a look
at the bottom boards while Dave cut back the long grass and brambles around
the apiary, giving us much more room.
We talked about how my hive is low to the ground, and how
to avoid damp over the winter. Dave suggested using
paving slabs in the short term, and for the longer term he offered to
make another double stand on which my hive could sit.
You can see the difference between the stands in
the post about the trail camera.
We must all
have felt as though beekeeping
is something we'd like to keep doing for some time,
because with the talk of this new stand came talk of a possible expansion to
four colonies next year.

Anyway,
it looks like tomorrow will be sunny, so we're going to do the inspection then.

Local beekeepers' association meetings can be an essential source of advice, being
full of very experienced beekeepeers. I went to yesterday's apiary meeting of
Burnham Beekeepers with
a bunch of questions, mostly from Thursday's inspection.

Firstly, some cool backstory about the second colony.
They were found in an old sofa, covered in wax, on a farm near
Berrow.
Thomas said they refused to go in the hive at first for an hour but the next
day they'd set up home. The second colony were the last swarm he collected
of the season, so we have been very lucky.

On the other hand, after talking about some of the things we'd seen, it
became clear that we're dealing with two possibly weak and definitely small
colonies. They are going to need special care if we're going to have them
around in the spring. This means doing a few things. Firstly,
as the foraging sources deplete from September onwards —
or maybe earlier depending
on the weather — they'll need
to start being fed more sugar syrup. Not just every week, but checks every
other day to make sure they are topped up.
Without enough food they would begin to go robbing other hives. The
availability or otherwise
of winter stores is the colonies' biggest threat at the moment.
Secondly, we may need to be more assertive with Varroa management, even if
we don't see much evidence of it.
An icing sugar shaker isn't going to cut it,
and some people said that method can damage grubs.
A dose of
Apiguard in
September was recommended, irrespective of the low varroa levels now,
with a midwinter oxalic acid treatment. I've done this before during my time at
Walworth Garden, where we
treated
with sublimation.
Somepeople
consider sublimation a more effective method, and you don't need to open up the
hive and disturb the bees in the middle of December.
Treatments are usually done in winter so that they don't affect the
honey taken
the next year, but we have the particularly important
need to keep our colonies as strong as possible.
Finally, over winter, it's said that not the cold that kills bees,
it's the damp, and we'll just need to keep an eye on that, not that I think
we have a big issue with that at the moment.

What about the things we saw on Thursday?
The few cells of chalkbrood is likely a sign of stress rather than damp, and doesn't
demand much action. The raised, cratered cell is likely to be drone brood
hatching in its own time. My pessimistic diagnosis of bald brood turned out to
be wrong — it's just be new bees hatching and nature doing its thing.
Most interesting of all, the extruded cell in
the centre of the central frame is indeed likely to be a
supersedure cell,
and there may be more.
It seems that the queen is about to be replaced, drone brood is around to
help with that, and we can only hope the attempt is successful.

All this useful advice and the lines of questioning that led to it
goes to show something about experience in general — that people
who really know their stuff work not by ticking off a checklist, but by being able
to tell when something is different or unusual. At the moment our inspections
feel a bit overwhelming to do within the ten minutes the bees give us,
as we try to remember all
there is to do. Hopefully as we get into beekeeping, we'll be able to just
scan the frames, see what's out of place, and gain a deeper understanding
of the colony. It's been fun so far.

D and Dave have a cool camouflaged motion-activated
trail camera that they use to capture
photos and video of wildlife. They set the camera up for a week or two
and if it
sees any motion, it records images or video onto a micro SD card, using night
vision if it's dark. The results are usually pretty good. We've seen plenty
of deer, foxes and rabbits, for example.

Here we can see a nice view of our two hives in the rather long grass, taken
on Tuesday morning at half-past seven. Two birds are perched on the gate and
another one is just coming in to join them. Of course, there's not a bee to
be seen.

We're now into August, and we're over most of the swarming season and into
the time of year when most beekeepers begin to think about harvesting honey.
For those of us looking after new colonies, we're thinking of the sufficiency
of food stores as the nectar supply dries up and pest control such Varroa treatments.
Although my colony has a few potential problems (see later), the drop on the
bottom tray is low and the colony comes from a swarm, which is considered to be a
lower risk for varroa.
Originally the place was to treat them with
a thymol-based treatment,
but we've decided to hold off for a few weeks if things continue to look good,
on the basis that it's best to leave them alone if we can get away with it.
We can consider other options if things suddenly get bad later.

Welshie on
IRC noted the
burr comb
on the bottom of the frame in the picture for the
last entry, and advised removing it to stop the
development of brace comb.
Brace comb spans gaps to give rigidity,
but makes inspection difficult and may end up containing valuable stuff
like brood or honey.
Given my bees' propensity to build irregular comb, I'm going to have
to be more diligent in scraping it off with my hive tool than usual.
Since last week, another two clumps of it had been built. Dave
remove it and put it on top of the frames for the bees to recover the
wax and any nectar from. You can also
fix it inside an empty framewith rubber bands,
or just take it away in a container with a lid,
but don't just leave it behind, because that can attract predators.

Anyway, we had the third inspection today, with
B and D both in attendance with plenty of enthusiasm.
As ever, things looked good, but
with a few surprises. And as ever, the list of things to look out for was
longer than a reasonable time limit would allow, so we didn't much queen spotting, but
instead looked more carefully at the comb.
We saw the queen last week, and I could make out
some eggs too, if in fewer numbers. Eggs are hard for me
to make out on the comb on
even a bright but cloudy day. Next time I'm going to bring my glasses and a
head torch to see whether that makes it easier.

Now, those surprises. There were three.
Firstly, there was the beginning of one extruded cell on the comb.
Although it didn't appear to hang down, this could be the beginning
of a single
supersedure
cell, signalling the colony's intention to replace the existing queen.
As is often the case with beekeeping,
the advice is to leave well alone and hope for a successful outcome.
If it is a supersedure cell,
we can hope the supersedure is successful and we end up with a new queen —
one which can lay and has enough sperm not to just lay drones. Maybe,
rather than my eyesight, the reason why I couldn't see many eggs was
that the queen isn't up to the job.
Secondly, possible signs of disease.
I saw a couple of cells with dead white brood in
them. This larval 'mummification' is
a sign of chalkbrood,
not usually a serious matter in a healthy colony but more of
a potential problem in smaller, stressed colonies. Interestingly,
the National Bee Unit
advise that avoiding
damp apiary sites will help to minimise chalkbrood, and we may well
have an issue with that, as I've noted before.
I might need to get my hive up on the higher and stronger stand that
Dave made (incidentally,
here's how to make one).
Thirdly,
about five or ten
raised, cratered, open-topped cells could be seen, with possibly the
two eyes of a bee ready to emerge within. It reminded me of the cell
shape in
the signs of bald brood, but there's no white larvae inside, and no lines
of cells or clumping from the underlying tunnelling wax moth larvae.
However, bald brood is the premature uncapping of pupae. Sometimes
that's genetic and
re-queening usually
solves it.
So, again, I'm not worried very much, particularly as it's only a few cells.
Maybe they are just fully-matured but dead,
or maybe the bee is waiting for some reason before
emerging.
I'll ask at the next local
association apiary meeting in a couple of days.

Otherwise, I'm generally happy —
a recognisably good brood pattern on the same 4½ (northmost) frames
if a little holey,
a nice circle of dusty grey-brown pollen had grown since last time,
lots of winter stores building up, lots of nice larvae and capped
brood in the cells and a nice docile colony.
Dave and D's colony looked great, building out the comb, no
queen seen but laying abundantly and generally looking active and happy.
Afterwards, we went home, talked about what we'd seen, and played Tantrix and
chess mini-games.

A seventeenth-century saying
goes "a swarm in May is worth a load of hay; a swarm in June is worth a silver spoon; but a swarm in July is not worth a fly."

Well, you could have fooled us. Today's inspection, at half past eight on a
nice sunny morning,
was the first time I'd inspected hives with Dave. We're pretty happy
with what we saw.
The queen was seen on both of the colonies,
as well as lots of honey stores being built up, and no obvious signs of
pests or disease.
Dave and D's colony has all the signs of a good start — eggs, stores
and a bit of pollen. There are more bees in this newer colony and Dave
remarked that the frames felt heavy.

Seeing the (unmarked)
queen on the colony I'm looking after is a relief, though last
week I saw a hundred or so eggs so I wasn't too concerned.
Since then
those eggs have developed, and there is now a lot of biscuity capped
brood, surrounded by pollen, surrounded by a lot of pale honey stores in the
familiar pattern. I could also see quite a few larvae developing.

Last week I noticed that the bees had decided to build to one side of
the hive. Dave's hive is the same configuration as mine —
cold way —
and his bees are starting from the north side of the hive too.
The other
weird thing last week was the irregular comb. They've built this out even further
in the past week,
almost appearing like it's a bit overloaded, appearing to bridge a little
between frames occasionally. However,
there's a good corridor of bee space between each, so I'm sure they know
what they're doing. I noticed quite a lot of propolis too, and had to
use the hive tool for the first time to crack apart sections of the hive.
Another look at the bottom board, mostly covered in wax flakes and a few
dead bees, doesn't suggest (yet) that there's a big Varroa problem in either
colony.

D has
a theory that her colony have more natural, wilder, foraging behaviour, having
left their sugar syrup alone and seen feeding on the nearby hedgerows.
We'd left a total of 1350ml of sugar syrup for mine, but the
hivewarming present is over now and so I removed the feeder. Time will
tell whether they go out foraging on the hedge, but the
muddy yellow
blackberry
pollen here and there on the comb suggests they have been out a bit already.

After we'd put out the smoker and talked about all we'd seen,
we all headed off to spend the day exploring
the area aroundWills Neck
on the Quantocks,
which reminded me why I love living in Somerset.

Queen seen?

Queen cells

Brood

# available frames for brood

Health

Estimated mites

Temper / docility

Feed given

# supers added

Weather

C1

✔

0

✔

6½

✔

l

8

0

0

19°C ☀

Older updates for July 2019 and before are archived. Indices are available for the year 2019.